Sermon thoughts and other musings

I remember as a young math student being taught the difference between an axiom and a theorem. A theorem was something that you tested or proved. An axiom was a given, a presumption.

In your faith, what is an axiom, and what is a theorem? What are our real axioms - our truly first principles - and what are things that are derivative from them?

Paul, in this famous passage from Romans, appears to me to be making a distinction that is analogous to the axiom/theorem distinction when he talks about the love of God. For most people, especially of that time, God's love was, at best, a theorem. They wondered, does God love us? How can we make God love us? And maybe some of them even deduced that God loves us.

But for Paul, God's love is an axiom. It comes before everything else. We can only interpret the universe after we have first understood that God loves us. We don't look at creation and deduce that God loves us because creation is so beautiful; we first understand that God loves us, and then understand that God created the universe because God loves us.

"For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord." - Romans 8:38-39

Paul understood this first. That allowed him to understand the rest.

As a kid, I loved ABC television's "Schoolhouse Rock." Do you remember songs like "Conjunction Junction" or "I'm Just A Bill"? One of my favorites was the Preamble to the Constitution. To this day, I know the words to the Preamble because of that song, which still plays in my head.

On this Independence Day weekend, let us remember that the American Revolution was not just about freedom from a monarchy, it was about freedom to create a just society. We didn't obtain freedom so that we would be free of all responsibility - freedom was about freedom from the allegiance to the king so we could have allegiance to one another.

When Jesus says in this passage: "my yoke is easy, my burden is light" - Jesus is telling us that we still have a yoke to wear. Life isn't a choice between a yoke or no yoke, it's between having a yoke put on us by the world, and having a yoke put on us by Christ.

And Christ's yoke ties us to the service of God and one another. But in that mindset, look at the Preamble again:

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Look at how much of the Preamble is about forming relationships to one another. It's not about freedom from each other, but freedom to help one another. Let us remember that freedom means freedom to serve our sisters and brothers in our society.